


If a Tree Falls in the Forest

by alliedtowinter



Category: Mother 2: Gyiyg no Gyakushuu | EarthBound
Genre: ADHD Jeff Andonuts, Angst, Character Study, Gen, Hypothermia, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Internal Monologue, Kind of depressing tbh, No Plot/Plotless, Not Beta Read, Not Happy, Self-Reflection, word vomit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-29
Updated: 2019-04-29
Packaged: 2020-02-09 13:44:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18639292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alliedtowinter/pseuds/alliedtowinter
Summary: If a tree falls in the forest, does it even make a sound?He has to keep going. Hehasto.But it's so hard.





	If a Tree Falls in the Forest

    If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it even make a sound?

 

    Jeff found himself wondering the same thing. The wind lashed and whipped at his face and bare hands. His thin uniform blazer did absolutely nothing to break the powerful tempests roiling through the woods. In between running from the goats and the feral dogs prowling, he blew on his frozen stiff blue-tipped fingers. He stifled another shiver and stopped himself from crying again. The tears would just freeze to his face and peel later; he knew from experience. 

 

    Every step felt like knives jamming themselves into the soles of his feet. Snow Wood’s uniform shoes weren’t meant for this. The sun had just fallen again and she would not be back until the long solstical night finished. How much farther did he have to go? An eighteen hour walk back to school with his head held down in shame, but where to his destination? Back to safety, back to warmth, back to food aside from the cookies shoved into his pocket meant for Tony’s birthday? Back to  _ Tony?  _ The more he thought on it, the less it seemed like a defeat and more like a realization of reality. It was just a dream, anyway. Surely nobody could fault him for returning back home, for returning to everything he had ever known. 

 

    No. He has to keep going. That was no dream, to have shown him two kids he’d never met before in a town he had never been to. They needed help. His help. If Paula and Ness didn’t get it from him, they would die. Even if he was wrong and the two children (young, and so, so, afraid; just like him) turned out to be mere figments of his imagination, at least he would have tried. For a short time Jeff would have relinquished the mantle of the coward and seen the world as it was meant to be seen. Cities beheld with his own two eyes, the sights and smells and tastes and sounds burnt into his mind as he cheerfully returned to monotony with the knowledge of what he was missing. The stories he could tell! It would be glorious, and it would be terrible. 

 

    But in the present moment his lips were blue and chapped. Hounds bayed in the distance. He had the strange urge to lay down in the Winters white and take a nap while he froze gently. Perhaps when he was blanketed in a gentle fleece of ice he would be warm again? He could barely see through the frost on the lenses of his glasses and the snow coating his eyelashes.  _ Just a little further, _ he urged himself. Still the morbid possibility of a lovely death nipped at his heels. If he were to fall here in the forest, would he even make a sound?

 

    He trudged on, lost in his own mind. The passage of time eluded him and seconds dipped into minutes into hours. One step after the other. That was all he could do, and it was enough. The cold metal of the pop gun clenched in his hands burnt bitter into his flesh. He could not feel his feet. His vision swam in and out of a pleasant hazy blur that obstructed the gravity of the situation.

 

    Over the horizon peeked the faintest traces of sunlight as a soft thump did not shake any birds from their trees. 


End file.
